The Minister and his colleagues across the Government have invested a lot of their political capital in the success of this Bill. We are here to ask whether it will work. At this point, it is extremely hard to express confidence that it will. When taken as a whole, I see a Bill that is looking to satisfy conflicting policy aims simultaneously, and it is hard to see such an endeavour having a successful end. Worse, the Bill is performing a kind of bait and switch when it comes to the private rental sector. The end result of this will certainly be a serious rollback in terms of rent affordability for thousands of people, for singles, for people sharing and for their families. This will have an impact on disposable income for a huge cohort into the longer term, and will drive more families into homelessness. The security of tenure measures would, in isolation, be welcomed. Such measures should have been introduced here ten or 15 years ago to bring Ireland in line with most other European countries. However, in no way can we say that this is an evolution in thinking from the Government parties toward valuing, safeguarding and making viable private renting for people's life cycles in the manner found in countries like Austria, Germany or Denmark. Leaving aside that such a policy would be incredible coming from either of the Government parties, the arrival of secure tenancy rules in the same instrument that, at a stroke, rolls back the key affordability safeguards shows us that the Government thinks of this as more of an experiment or a gamble. The success of that gamble is fully riding on the ability of large-scale developers and investors to deliver apartments at scale, and those who can afford to live in those apartments be damned, either through purchase or through rental arrangements. There are going to be victims here. There are going to be people and families who experience the hard end of the Government's gamble. They are people who will have to agree to far steeper rents that hit their incomes harder than anything we saw during the inflation crisis. They are people who already have no way out of renting and now will see that only lifeline extinguished. It may be a cohort that the Government parties have judged you can dump on without losing support, but that would be a critical mistake. I assume the Department has attempted to model the impact of these changes. Maybe in the Minister's sum-up speech he could tell us exactly how long it will take for supply to increase to a level that would result in what would be considered a normal or sustainable rate of rent inflation. That analysis or projection would be really valuable, because that is the fulcrum upon which this entire experiment turns. That honesty to people in terms of what we are expecting, and how long it is going to take for this gamble to work, is important because housing is at the core of how people plan their entire lives. It is the literal foundation upon which people are able to plan where they go to work or whether they stay at home to care for children, buy two cars or one, go to college, or even whether they think it is worthwhile to stay in Ireland at all. Will the Minister of State reassure us safeguards will be put in place to mitigate some of the worst increases that may come about as a result of the market rate reset? Has the Government's model determined the proportion of tenants who will see the steeper ends of the increases? Will additional funding be provided to the local authority cost-rental tenant in situ scheme, which is a measure that has a direct effect in providing an alternative for people? Have measures been put in place to do something to mitigate the short-term pain it is absolutely clear will be endured by many renters as a result of these proposals?

Sentiment score: 0.19